Instagram Will Now Let You See When Your Friends Are Online

Now, you’ll be able to see when your Instagram friends are available to chat. In other words, if your friends are on the app, you’ll know it.

When your friends are active on Instagram, there’ll be a green dot next to their profile picture. You’ll see this throughout various places in the app, including the Direct inbox as well as your friend list when you are trying to share a post from your feed and click that little paper airplane icon.

You won’t be able to see this online status on every profile, just the friends who follow you as well as the people you had previously talked to in Direct.

The good news, however, is that you have the ability to hide your own status and if you don’t want to know the status of others, you can turn the feature off completely in your settings.

And if you are wondering why the hell Instagram decided to do this in the first place, here is their answers from the press statement:

“DMing friends and connecting over the content you love is more fun when you know your friends are there to see it. This update gives you the ability to have more of those realtime conversations while giving you the control to hide your status altogether.”

Great. It’s one thing when you don’t receive a response from someone and can hope that they possibly maybe didn’t see it (even though you know they did), it’s another to know that they are ignoring you. Damn it, Instagram, that little dot is going to cause nothing but problems. That being said, the app already has a feature that lets you know whether someone saw your message anyway. So either way, you were going to find out that that girl you asked out is ignoring you. Damn.